Podcast: Adam Davidson on “Trump Fact and Fiction”

Transcript

Listen: Ian sits down with The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, who follows the money around President Trump and tries to separate fact from fiction.

TRANSCRIPT: Adam Davidson on “Trump Fact and Fiction”

Adam Davidson:

When I think about who is Donald Trump, this is a man who never showed a particular interest in geopolitics, never showed a particular interest in complicated schemes that would take a lot of effort and quiet. He likes big real estate deals. So my assumption is, for him, this was all about real estate.

I've talked to two different people within the Trump world who said the whole campaign was ... Originally, no one thought he'd win. It was a way to get a bigger name, maybe get that Trump Tower Moscow, maybe get a few other projects off the ground.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm host of the weekly show "GZERO World" on public television. In this podcast, we share extended versions of the big interviews from that show.

This week, I sit down with Adam Davidson, staff writer at the New Yorker. He covers all things business, tech and politics. Today, I'll ask him, among other things, about Trump's foreign business deals, and what problems around them could mean for the future of his presidency. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

And I'm here in the West Village with Adam Davidson. Adam, great to be with you.

Adam Davidson:

Great to be here, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

Let's get it right to the heart of it.

Adam Davidson:

Okay.

Ian Bremmer:

Trump is Putin's stooge. You see it on the media 24/7 with some channels. You've done all the investigative work. I want to understand. Do you believe that there is evidence, any evidence, that is the case?

Adam Davidson:

I think, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo said, the best evidence is like the evidence of a black hole. We can see that there's some gravitational force, where Trump behaves with Putin unlike he behaves with any other human being in the world. We know that there have been times he's been angry at Putin in private, but has not lashed out, so that is-

Ian Bremmer:

When he showed the nuke raining down on Mar-a-Lago, for example, right?

Adam Davidson:

When he showed the nuke raining down on Mar-a-Lago. Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. He didn't like that.

Adam Davidson:

Yeah. He didn't like it, but he didn't say anything.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, it's a property thing.

Adam Davidson:

Yeah. As Keith Darden at American University told me, it shows he's capable of restraint and strategic thinking. But I don't think we have... What we definitely have are two overlapping processes. We have Russia...

According to the estimates of Gabriel Zucman at University of California, Berkeley, half of Russian wealth is hidden overseas. It's a massive amount of money. It is a torrent of trillions of dollars that have flown out of Russia. Much of that money is money that flowed through oligarchic channels in a complicated way, both to hide it from Putin, and also with Putin's awareness this was happening and Putin's participation in it.

So you have this funnel of money coming from Russia, and Trump is one of a bunch of people who are grabbing at that money and entering, essentially, the Russian oligarchic capital system. So we have Trump bumbling into this system, grabbing at this system, and we have Putin using this system in multiple ways to advance his interests.

Ian Bremmer:

So in your view, Trump is not really aware that he has bumbled into the system. It's just easy, useful money for his organization. Is that correct?

Adam Davidson:

Yes. I think he's aware that he crossed lines. I think he's aware that he took actions that he needs to keep hidden. I think he...

Ian Bremmer:

In these various dealings.

Adam Davidson:

In these various dealings.

Ian Bremmer:

But you don't believe that he is aware that, "I am colluding with the Kremlin to get this cash."

Adam Davidson:

Yes. I think that if you prove collusion, you prove kompromat of collusion. Because if you prove that Trump actively participated in an effort to steal an election with the Russian state...

Ian Bremmer:

No, no. I'm not going there. I'm just talking about, on the financial side, it sounds like you don't believe the intentionality is not only provable, but not there.

Adam Davidson:

I don't think it's there. I think... I don't think it's provable today. Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

But also it sounds like you don't think it's there.

Adam Davidson:

Yeah. My best assessment is, before the presidential campaign, Trump saw this as a source of easy money, fairly risk-free money. The US authorities rarely prosecute this kind of financial crime. They're extremely hard cases to prove. They have to be proven by the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice does a few dozen a year, and usually it's self reported, and they've shown that they want big, big settlements. They're not going to get 800 million out of Trump.

So I think he saw it as easy money. I think he almost certainly either knew or so strongly suspected he effectively knew that his partners were engaged in possibly serious financial crime, like terror financing. But he didn't think of it as a state level activity.

Now, I think that there's an awful lot of interaction between the Trump campaign and various Russians. I think that's way more than is explicable from purely innocent motives. So I think it's worth looking. I'm definitely not ready to say there clearly was no collusion.

When I think about who is Donald Trump, this is a man who never showed a particular interest in geopolitics, never showed a particular interest in complicated schemes that would take a lot of effort and quiet. He likes big real estate deals, and so my assumption is, for him, this was all about real estate.

I've talked to two different people within the Trump world who said the whole campaign was originally... No one thought he'd win. It was a way to get a bigger name, maybe get that Trump Tower Moscow, maybe get a few other projects off the ground.

Ian Bremmer:

Let's roll it to today. He becomes president, against the expectations of pretty much everybody, certainly including myself. What then changes, if anything?

Adam Davidson:

I think first of all, you have a situation where he is loudly advertising that he doesn't believe that he is constrained from doing business. You have a person who has always wanted other people's money. He uses that language. He's wanted other people's money. And you have several state actors, Russia, China, Israel, India, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, poor little Qatar...

Ian Bremmer:

Philippines.

Adam Davidson:

Philippines...

Ian Bremmer:

A lot of them, yeah.

Adam Davidson:

... building operations designed to influence either Donald Trump himself, one of his kids, or Jared Kushner or his family, by building financial ties.

When you think, what are the constraints, what would prevent that from happening ... Trump himself has said he is immune from prosecution for doing business as president. It seems very clear he has sent a signal to his cabinet and to others, do as much business as you need to. We're not going to look at you.

One of the areas I really want to devote myself to is what are the potential avenues for him making wealth while president, and how do those influence foreign policy decisions? And it's a tricky area, because you'd want to see places where he's doing something that runs counter to his instincts.

He seems to have an instinctive attraction to autocrats. He seems to have made either a genuine or calculated decision to support the most hard-line Israeli position on Israel. He seems quite taken with the Saudis. Is that because they paid him off or is that because those are his instincts? It's very hard.

You look at things like in China, the ZTE decision, where-

Ian Bremmer:

The Chinese telecom company.

Adam Davidson:

The Chinese telecom company where Trump-

Ian Bremmer:

That he decided not to bankrupt that company.

Adam Davidson:

Yeah. He decided... They were pretty bad actors, trying to use their technology to essentially spy on folks. He intervened to save this Chinese company, saying he was worried about Chinese jobs. That's a weird one.

Ian Bremmer:

Have you found, do you think, any supportive evidence thus far?

Adam Davidson:

When Trump went to China, one of his big moments was saying, "I'm so thrilled that the Chinese have committed to this $25 billion purchase or contract with American Ethane." Nobody's ever heard of American Ethane. Sounds pretty American. Sounds good. Must be lots of American jobs.

American Ethane is a paper company. It's done nothing. It's bought-

Ian Bremmer:

Does not exist as a firm.

Adam Davidson:

It is owned by a group of Russian nationals. Alexander Nikolaev, who we know was the man giving money to Maria Butina, the woman arrested for spying for Russia. It's owned by Roman Abramovich, was at the time, he's out of it now, a close Putin aide and advisor.

Ian Bremmer:

And oligarch.

Adam Davidson:

And oligarch. And then a group of Georgian Jews who had close ties with the central Asians who Trump did business with. The CEO was one American lawyer from Louisiana.

Ian Bremmer:

The rest of them were 'Ethane.' He was the 'American.'

Adam Davidson:

Yes, exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

I got it. Yeah.

Adam Davidson:

When this deal went through, the ethane industry, such as it is, really started scratching its head, because they said, "This deal makes literally no sense." The idea was we're going to export however many units of ethane through Houston to China. They pointed out that it would equal all the ethane in the world to fulfill these contracts. It would require the building of 30 massive terminals to properly handle this ethane. The company involved is a company that owns some wells around the world, but really has not made a dime, hasn't done anything. It has not done anything.

And so, you look at a deal like that, a deal where you have a bunch of Russians spending millions, they spent about 50 million to get a $25 billion deal from the Chinese- that makes no sense at all. That only happened because President Trump used it as a moment to show business ties between China and the US.

It really makes you wonder. What is going on there? What are the relationships? I have no evidence that Trump himself is profiting from this deal, but he certainly saw it in his interest to make this deal, this very confusing deal that clearly made people very close to Putin happy.

Ian Bremmer:

Is there reason to believe, with all of this smoke, that what the Mueller investigation is covering will itself actually unearth fire?

Adam Davidson:

We saw it again and again where we saw information released. I remember the Carter Page FISA warrant, which if you actually read the document, is pretty exculpatory of any crooked scheme by the deep-state Democrats to destroy Trump. But Trump announced that's what it was, and his followers seemed to go with it.

It's an odd thing that, I think for some large percentage of the country, we don't really need more information. We've already come to the conclusion [that] this is a man who's unfit for office. Then for another large portion, it's irrelevant. So will Mueller ... Look. I think there are clear fat tales when you're dealing with Trump.

Ian Bremmer:

But there is a difference between all of this stuff that smells really bad and clear evidence of illegal activity by the President of the United States. Irrespective of whether he's indictable for that or not, there's a very big gap.

Adam Davidson:

As a constitutional matter. Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

That's right. Yeah.

Adam Davidson:

Yeah. I think you're talking about a crowd of people who took wild risks. You would get hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for actively participating in a money laundering Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So this is a group of people, including Donald Trump, who take wild risks, who are very, very sloppy in their internal accounting. We now know, actually through the lawsuit that the New York attorney general has filed against the Trump Family Foundation, we've learned just how reckless they were with their internal accounting. It's, frankly, small beer stuff. It's not going to end the presidency or send anyone to jail.

Ian Bremmer:

$10,000 purchase of a painting, stuff like that.

Adam Davidson:

But it's an indicator of an internal control that is all but nonexistent, that is wildly reckless. And I think Paul Manafort, who seemed to be a character who was clever, and-

Ian Bremmer:

The former head of the Trump campaign.

Adam Davidson:

Former head of the Trump campaign. We now see, his money laundering scheme was so blatant, so easily documented.

Ian Bremmer:

Though he wasn't involved with Trump at the time he was engaging in it.

If you like what you've seen, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Adam Davidson:

Well, some of it. Most of it wasn't. Some of it overlapped.

Ian Bremmer:

See you next week.

Adam Davidson:

What I'm saying is, when you have very, very reckless people who have a long track record of taking wild risks to get relatively minor gains, I think that you have to... There is a decent... There is a possibility... Is it 3%? Is it 8%? I'm not saying it's much higher than that, that they did something, that they left some record of profound collusion that is unrecoverable from. I do think-

Ian Bremmer:

If you were going to bet, after all is said and done, the Mueller investigation is finished, it's come out publicly, it sounds like what you're saying is the country's going to feel like it does now, just more so.

Adam Davidson:

Look. The easiest thing to say is what's happening today will happen tomorrow, and will happen the day after that, and will happen a year from now. Forecasts are always terrible at predicting inflection points. But if you ask me intellectually, I'd say, "Yeah. We kind of stay like this forever." But my gut sense is there's a cost to be paid, and at some point, Trump's support collapses, and the Republican party, at least the official party, is overjoyed.

Ian Bremmer:

Adam Davidson, good to be with you.

Adam Davidson:

Thank you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joining us, an economist at Columbia University, leading climate change advocate, not Donald Trump's best friend. Don't miss it. In the meantime, if you like what you've seen, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

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